222 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



1847 to the Fellowship of the Royal Society who has 

 not done a large amount of sound work, and the 

 credit of the Society has been continuously main- 

 tained at a high level. 



Many persons imagine in their innocence that 

 when any one appends letters to his name testifying 

 to his being a Fellow of one or more learned societies 

 that he is necessarily a scientific expert. This is true 

 for hardly any other society than the Royal. In all 

 others the letters show little more than that the 

 person who uses them is sufficiently interested in the 

 sciences in question to make it worth his while to 

 pay an annual subscription. I have served on the 

 Councils of many of these societies, and can only recall 

 two cases in which a proposed candidate was not 

 elected. In the one, the man had been imprisoned for 

 a grave offence ; in the other, he was a wastrel well 

 known to avoid paying his debts. 



Many pleasant days have been spent by me under 

 the hospitable roof of Mr. and Mrs. Hills. She was, 

 as already mentioned, a daughter of Sir William 

 Grove, and has been one of my closest friends ever 

 since the terrible illness of my wife mentioned above. 

 Her husband, Judge Hills, died very recently. He 

 was a judge in Alexandria, where he resided during 

 the larger part of the year, but returned every 

 autumn to exercise hospitality in England. 



The conversational powers of Sir William Grove 

 were remarkable when he was sufficiently excited to 

 show them to advantage. One evening, before going 

 to a distant meeting of the British Association, he, 

 Professor Huxley, and myself, dined together at the 

 same table at the Athenaeum. Never, before or since, 



